Thursday, October 14, 2010

CJR on the Financial Times' Foreclosure Coverage: Kudos for Alphaville, Better Late than Never for the Paper

We are fans of Alphaville.
From the Columbia Journalism Review's The Audit blog:

The Financial Times has a good piece of reporting on page one of today’s paper that advances the ball on the foreclosure scandal.

Up to now, Wells Fargo and Citigroup have been conspicuous among too-big-to-fail banks for keeping its foreclosure machine churning. JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have both stopped foreclosures nationwide as they review their practices, as has GMAC aka Ally Financial.

Smart reporters notice that stuff and zero in on it. The FT’s story will force the moratorium issue with Wells.
It reports that Wells used the now notorious robosigners to fraudulently speed through foreclosure documents:

In a sworn deposition on March 9 seen by the FT, Xee Moua, identified in court documents as a vice-president of loan documentation for Wells, said she signed as many as 500 foreclosure-related papers a day on behalf of the bank.

Ms Moua, who was deposed as part of a foreclosure lawsuit in Palm Beach County, Florida, said that the only information she verified was whether her name and title appeared correctly, according to the document.
Asked whether she checked the accuracy of the principal and interest that Wells claimed the borrower owed – a crucial step in banks’ legal actions to repossess homes – Ms Moua said: “I do not.”

It also has another deposition from a Wells robosigner in its accompanying inside story.
The FT, like the Journal has been behind on this story, at least in the paper itself. The FT’s Tracy Alloway, writing for its Alphaville blog has been doing good stuff on the implications of the scandal for mortgage securities markets...MORE